(Much about men’s bodies and sex between men, in plain language, with photos, so not at all for kids or the sexually modest.)
The fox in question is Sean Ford, a model and gay porn actor and observer of the worlds of homosexuality, sex work, love between men, and identities and personas. The friends are Angel Rivera, his partner in a scene (both sweet and hot) in the recent porn flick Lips Together; and Peter Berlin, a famous object of gay sexual fantasy in classic porn and the fox’s partner in a 2020 Interview magazine piece on performing gay sex.
It started with a 5/27 e-mail ad (from Game Link Gay, for a Memorial Day sale) featuring shots from videos on sale, including a Rivera Fucks Ford shot (from the CockyBoys 2020 DVD Lips Together, Six Feet Apart) that is notable for both the men’s facial expressions and their position in the sexual act (both recurrent topics on this blog).
In this posting: on the shot, the facial expressions, the sex position, the video and the two actors. Then in a second installment, to come: on an interview with Ford, on eroticism, intimacy, and love. And on an interview with Ford and Berlin, on jealousy and monogamy, and on aspects of working in the gay porn business: managing a porn persona, getting work, continuing in the business, earning enough to live on (all aspects of the business I’ve touched on in postings on the blog).
To start things off, the shot cropped to isolate the men’s facial expressions:
(#1) An Ecstatic face on Ford (on the right), intense focus on Ford’s face by Rivera (on the left) — a version of a Good Buddy face
(Includes discussion of sexual acts in very plain terms, with an illustration, so totally not for kids or the sexually modest.)
A message on 5/25 (anticipating the US holiday Memorial Day) from an American company, edited so as to avoid identifying the company or its nature:
(#1) The crucial phrase in the mailing — look at the small print — is for all of your servicing needs, because of the ambiguity in the verb service in it
Being the sort of person that I am, I first read this (with considerable enjoyment) as using the sexual verb service, so I was dismayed that from May 29th though the 31st the company would not be available to provide me with the sexual attentions I might crave; its website would scarcely suffice as a replacement for personal care.
(Men’s bodies as sexual objects — women’s, too — and sex between men, all of this discussed in street language, with edgy images, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
At the intersection of the pinup-girl world (AZ Page here) and the premium men’s underwear world (AZ Page here), two recent ads from the Daily Jocks people: from 3/28, under the mail header “Model of the week: Freddy”, an ad for OnlyJox subscriptions, already of interest to me for its display of male buttocks as sexual objects for a male audience and for pushing the line between softcore and hardcore porn in doing so; and from 4/2, an ad for the DJ Easter sale, already of interest to me for its display of the front surface of the model’s body as series of sexual objects for a male audience, from the framing of his penis in a jockstrap though the sexualized presentation of his armpits, pectoral muscles and nipples.
The 4/2 ad is also quite clearly the photographer’s carefully composed re-creation of a classic pinup pose using a male model. And then I realized that that the 3/8 ad was in fact a bow to yet another classic pinup pose.
(The true title is, of course “Putting the fuck into Fuck VDay”; I’ve replaced occurrences of fuck by obscenicons for citation purposes. But the posting is indeed heavily (though not entirely) about men fucking men, so it’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
The story began yesterday (2/7), with mailings for four different sites, all with the Fuck Vday Sale ad image:
(#1)
Twink Top (role reversal, with twinks as tops), Fun Size Boys (“featuring little guys taken sexually by really big guys”), Growl Boys (“anthropomorphic gay furry fantasy stories of werewolves and mythological creatures”), Gaycest (dad/son sex), Boy For Sale (slave boys).
(The Twink Top and Fun Size Boys sites are treated in my 8/10/20 posting “The pleasures of role reversal”.)
More on these sites below, except to note that they are very much about fucking (and that turns out to be relevant).
The question is how Fuck Vday is to be understood in the ad slogan. Is it an instance of what I’ve called the expletive predicatefuck (James D. McCawley’s quasi-verbfuck), which has no sexual content? In my 12/27/17 posting “Expletive syntax: I will marry the crap out of you, Sean Spencer”, I note that expletive predicate fuck is one of the
idiomatic uses of specific expletives to curse, deprecate, or dismiss things, as in:
Fuck this proposal! To/The hell with them! Shit on the whole business!
Expletive predicate fuck occurs commonly in the dismissive Fuck VDay! and Fuck Valentine’s Day! (disavowing any interest in celebrating the holiday) — examples below.
Or is the ad slogan Fuck Vday to be understood as announcing Valentine’s Day as a celebration of fucking — in which case the slogan would seem to be a compound noun with Vday as head and Fuck as a noun (denoting a fuck or fucks) or a verb (denoting fucking), so that the interpretation would be either ‘Valentine’s Day for a fuck or fucks’ or ‘Valentine’s Day for people to fuck on’ (the distinction is subtle), parallel to something like Fuck Weekend (The members of Sigma Epsilon Xi always looked forward to Fuck Weekend).
Since the ad slogan appears to be both intensely sexual — it’s all about the fucking — and celebratory (rather than dismissive or deprecatory), I incline to the compound noun interpretation.
Carnal Media. The four sites listed above in connection with #1 are all Carnal Media sites (the company has a number of niche gay porn websites,all run as subscription services that offer an inventory of videos the subscriber can view), including also Scout Boys, Raw Fuck Boys, Jason Sparks Live, Dirty Boy Society, and Jock Pussy.
Say Uncle is a subsite in the Lucas family of gay porn sites. It embraces a number of “premium” series, mostly involving men in relationships of unequal power [also many taboo-breaking relationships]:
Family Dick (in step families); Missionary Boys; Brother Crush (step brothers); Yes Father (church leaders); Latin Leche (Latin boys doing g4p); Young Perps (loss prevention officers and male shoplifters); Black Godz (powerful gay black men and their male subs); Dad Creep (stepdad/stepson); Stay Home Bro (bros quarantined together)
And in my 1/27/19 posting “Two specialist porn companies”, what appears to be an independent operation, Peter Fever: “featuring quality videos of muscular Asian men jocks and twinks”. (The other specialist company in that posting is Growl Boys.)
All of these sites are focused on fucking, with a variety of emotional tones. Something of a surprise, from the Jason Sparks Live site at Carnal Media, is this still showing JJ Knight & Jack Hunter from the video BAREBACK in Birmingham:
(#2)
The two men smile a lot; in this photo, they’re two nice guys, sporting welcoming half-smiles, who happen to be fucking, bareback, in the woods on a beautiful day (the Loving Buddies facial expression); as they get into fucking, their facial expressions go into Man at Work, aka Workman / Craftsman — see the Page on this blog on facial expressions in mansex.
Fuck Valentine’s Day!, with the expletive predicate fuck. So much for the sex. Now to the Strong Language (A Sweary Blog About Swearing) site, “Fuck Valentine’s Day!” by Nancy Friedman on 2/5/15:
Hearts, flowers, chocolate, candlelight, blah, blah, whatever. For some of us, February 14 is just a date on the calendar with the name of some obscure saint inexplicably attached to it, and “St. Valentine’s Day” is properly followed by only one word: “massacre.” Good news, though — thanks to the increasingly robust Fuck Valentine’s Day movement, we can spend our money just as recklessly as the roses-and-diamonds crowd. Fuck, yeah!
— with an entertaining collection of graphic resources, among them:
(#3) An apostrophe-free tank top from Skreened, $17.99
(#4) The classic “Keep Calm” poster “Available as a poster, mug, mouse mat, decal, and much more at The Keep Calm-o-Matic.”
Every year, an emotionally difficult time of the year: Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s death day is 1/17 (this year a Sunday, today), and my man Jacques Transue’s birthday is 1/22 (a Friday this year). When Ann died, in January 1985, it was in fact extraordinarily cold and bleak in Columbus OH; and then of course Jacques’s birthday was pretty much swallowed up by the aftermaths of Ann’s death (including a memorial service at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, on the Ohio State campus).
This year, I’m in Palo Alto CA, where midwinter is normally wet and cool (though not truly cold), but also green and graced by many winter-blooming flowers. In fact, this year it’s unseasonably dry and what counts as warm for winter here (high temperatures near 70 F., at least for a while), so the edge has been somewhat taken off my midwinter funk over my lost loves.
Into the midst of this have come some touching photos of J in his later years, as he was sliding towards death (which finally came in 2003) — a contrast to the photos of him that I’ve been posting here recently, photos of a strong, vital, handsome younger J.
In the 9/21 issue of the New Yorker, this Lila Ash cartoon “Evolution of Man”:
(#1) New Yorker description of the cartoon: The evolution of man from a fish to a human throwing their phone in the water, and swimming in to retrieve it.
Yet another variation on the Ascent of Man theme; there have been so many of these on this blog that there’s a Page cataloguing them, here.
… with vivid pops of genital color in their underwear, plus waistbands that celebrate peace and freedom, also exhibiting sharply differentiated roles in their relationship. Lots of stuff packed into just one Daily Jocks ad (for the Modus Vivendi Peace line of underwear) from 7/15. There will be plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this posting is not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.
